MOOCs at Swiss Universities

Exciting MOOCs from Swiss universities that you might want to follow in 2018/2019!

Swiss universities are getting more involved in spreading knowledge through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). Here is a brief overview of what you can learn for free* and from home.

University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, the University of Zurich will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan.

Robots are rapidly evolving from factory workhorses, which are physically bound to their work-cells, to increasingly complex machines capable of performing challenging tasks in our daily environment. The objective of this course is to provide the basic concepts and algorithms required to develop mobile robots that act autonomously in complex environments.

Information Technology (IT) is everywhere. Every aspect of human activity depends on it. All IT processes, whether they drive mobile phones, the Internet, transportation systems, enterprise systems, publishing, social networks or any other application, rely on software. In this new and improved version of the course, you will learn to write software with a progressive hint system for first time programmers. The core skill is programming; not just the ability to piece together a few “lines of code,” but writing quality programs, which will do their job right, and meet the evolving needs of their users. Anyone can write a program; this course teaches you to write good programs. The course starts from the basics of computing and takes you through a tour of modern object-oriented programming, including classes, objects, control structures, inheritance, polymorphism, and genericity.

What will our future look like? Will we continue burning fossil fuels or will we live in a 100% renewable world? How can we address climate change and what policies do we need to implement? We will provide you with model examples to make you familiar with aspects of economic modeling and state-of-the-art research on current debates in energy policy. This online course explores these concerns, using models in environmental and energy economics. You will learn how to design models, how to interpret and use results to make informed decisions, and how to use models to assess energy and environmental policies.

The central idea of this course is to bring together participants around the world having a strong interest in Zika. We welcome persons from multiple fields and different backgrounds, including researchers, professors and students in related academic fields, health care professionals, policy makers and stakeholders working with Zika related issues, and also anyone who is looking forward to knowing more about this outbreak without borders.

This course will teach you core concepts from image acquisition to image filtering and segmentation, to help you tackle simple image analysis workflows on your own. All examples use open source solutions, in order to allow you to be independent from commercial solutions. Emphasis is made on good practices and typical pitfalls in image analysis. At the end of this course, you will be able to adapt and reuse workflows to suit your specific needs and be equipped with the tools and knowledge to adapt and seek advice from the ever-growing image analyst community of which you will be a part now.

Learn about the fundamentals of transmission electron microscopy in materials sciences: you will be able to understand papers where TEM has been used and have the necessary theoretical basis for taking a practical training on the TEM.